by Paul Ortiz
31. Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, xxix; Thomas Fleming, in his new introduction to Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier: Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of Joseph Plumb Martin, 1830 (New York: Signet Classics, 2001), notes, “By 1780, every seventh soldier in the ranks was black” (xx).
32. For an overview of these petitions, see Herbert Aptheker, ed., Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, 2 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1951), 1: 6–10; Thomas J. Davis, “Emancipation Rhetoric, Natural Rights, and Revolutionary New England: A Note on Four Black Petitions in Massachusetts, 1773–1777,” New England Quarterly 62, no. 2 (June 1989): 248–63.
33. “Peter Bestes and Other Slaves Petition for Freedom (April 20, 1773),” in Aptheker, Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, 7–8. See also Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1977), 350.
34. Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 8th ed., vol. 1 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1999), 65–66.
35. Gary Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Herbert Aptheker, The Negro in the American Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1940); Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution; “Run Away About a Month Ago,” South Carolina Gazette, advertisement, November 25, 1777; William Loren Katz, Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage, rev. ed. (1986; New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012).
36. Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 117. Peter Wood, “‘The Dream Deferred’: Black Freedom Struggles on the Eve of Independence,” in In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History, ed. Gary Y. Okihiro (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), states that during the Revolution, “In every Southern colony, from Maryland to Georgia, slaves threatened armed revolt” (173).
37. Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, xxvii.
38. “Continental Congress Motion of Protest Against British Practice of Carrying Off American Negroes [26 May 1783],” Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-03-02-0239 (accessed May 9, 2017).
39. “The Definitive Treaty of Peace, 1783,” available online at the Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/paris.asp.
40. Thomas Jefferson, “To the British Minister, May 29th,” in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 12 vols., ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 7: 41.
41. Beckles Willson, Friendly Relations: A Narrative of Britain’s Ministers and Ambassadors to America, 1791–1930 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), 17.
42. Lynd, Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution, 153–54.
43. Paul Finkelman, “The Proslavery Origins of the Electoral College,” Cardoza Law Review 23, no. 4 (2002): 1145–57.
44. “Race—The Power of an Illusion,” timeline, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_03_d-godeeper.htm (accessed November 10, 2015).
45. Evelyn Nakano Glenn argues, “Of all wealthy countries in the world, the United States is the only one to have substantially relied, for its economic development, on the labor of peoples from all three nonwhite areas of the globe: Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Thus, a central feature of the U.S. economy has been its reliance on racialized and gendered systems of control, including coercion. Racialization in the labor market has been buttressed by a system of citizenship designed to reinforce the control of employers and to constrain the mobility of workers.” In Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 5.
46. Thomas Law to James Madison, October 18, 1797, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-17-02-0040 (accessed May 9, 2017). On Thomas Law, see George Alfred Townsend, “Thomas Law, Washington’s First Rich Man,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society (Washington, DC: 1901): 222–45, https://archive.org/stream/jstor-40066782/40066782#page/n23/mode/2up.
47. Julius Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,” PhD diss., Duke University, 1986; James, Black Jacobins.
48. Gerald Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015); David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002); George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America: Black Lives, 1800–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Laurent Dubois and Julius Scott, eds., Origins of the Black Atlantic (New York: Routledge, 2009); Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2013); “Telling Histories: A Conversation with Laurent Dubois and Greg Grandin,” Radical History Review 115 (Winter 2013): 11–25.
49. “Annual Examination,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, May 6, 1859; “Hayti no. IV,” Freedom’s Journal, June 15, 1827; “The Republic of Haiti,” Christian Recorder, May 8, 1873; “All Signs Point,” Freeman (Indianapolis), December 5, 1896; “Sad Bereavement,” Colored American, July 3, 1903; “Beautiful Haiti and Its Brave Hearted People,” Negro World, February 21, 1925; Mitch Kachun, “Antebellum African Americans, Public Commemoration, and the Haitian Revolution: A Problem of Historical Mythmaking,” in African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents, ed. Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon (New York: Routledge, 2009), 93–106. African Americans in Durham, North Carolina, named their community “Hayti,” and it became known as the “Black Wall Street” in the twentieth century. See Leslie Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
50. Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 102.
51. Daniel Rasmussen, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt (New York: Harper, 2011), 102.
52. Douglas Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (1999; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
53. This account is based on The Life, Travels, and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy: Including His Journeys (Philadelphia: William D. Parish, 1847); 206–7; Ralph Clayton, “Baltimore’s Own Version of ‘Amistad’: Slave Revolt,” Baltimore Chronicle, January 7, 1998, http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/slave_ship2.html (accessed October 27, 2015); Eric Robert Taylor, If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 147–50.
54. Sublette and Sublette, American Slave Coast, 426–32; Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South, 120–22; “A Bitter Inner Harbor Legacy: The Slave Trade,” Baltimore Sun, July 12, 2000; Johnson, Soul by Soul; Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1989).
55. Niles-Register story cited in “Domestic Slave Trade,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 17, 1845.
56. “The Secret History of the Slave Trade [in Baltimore],” Baltimore Sun, June 20, 1999.
57. Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (1950; Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 196. For other reports of the slave trade in Baltimore, see “Summary of News,” Friends Review: A Religious, Literary and Miscellaneous Journal 1, no. 32 (April 1848): 512; “The Readers of the Review,” Friends Review 1, no. 34 (May 1848): 538.
58. Sublette and Sublette, American Slave Coast, 24.
59. Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
60. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 403–6.
61. Calvin Schermerhorn, “What Else You Should Know About Baltimore,” History News Network, May 4, 2015, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/159294; Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).
62. “Blessings of Slavery in Baltimore Maryland!,” Freedom’s Journal, October 31, 1828. The writer is borrowing from Thomas Jefferson’s famous dictum on slavery, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
63. “Kidnapping Children,” North Star, April 10, 1851.
64. “Wrongs of the Colored People,” Colored American, January 30, 1841.
65. “Baltimore Correspondence,” National Era, August 26, 1847. See also “Domestic Slave Trade,” Freedom’s Journal, March 7, 1829; “A Little Matter,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 1, 1850.
66. Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee, Slavery in Cuba: A Report of the Proceedings of the Meeting (New York: Powers, MacGowan & Slipper, 1873), 17; A Memorial Discourse by Rev. Henry Highland Garnet (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1865), 23.
67. James Still, Early Recollections and Life of Dr. James Still (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1877), 105–10.
68. John Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 415.
69. “Underground Railroad Made Stops in Baltimore,” Baltimore Sun, October 22, 1993.
70. Frank Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary: C. L. R. James and the Struggle for a New Society (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 39–40; Franklin, Runaway Slaves; Larry Eugene Rivers, Rebels and Runaways: Slave Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
71. “200 Dollars Reward,” Baltimore Sun, advertisement, September 14, 1842, in “Runaway Slave Ads, Baltimore County, Maryland,” http://www.afrigeneas.com/library/runaway_ads/balt-1842.html (accessed September 13, 2015).
72. Historian John Hope Franklin used the term “quasi-free Blacks” to highlight the pervasive legal, economic, and social discrimination faced by “free” African Americans in the antebellum era. Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 148–70; T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997).
73. “Slavery in Maryland,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, August 7, 1845.
74. “Wrongs of the Colored People,” Colored American, January 30, 1841.
75. Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
76. “The Runaway Negroes,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 17, 1845.
77. Hadden, Slave Patrols. This may be seen as an example of what George Lipsitz refers to as the “possessive investment of whiteness.” See Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, rev. and expanded ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), vii–viii.
78. “Baltimore Justice!,” Freedom’s Journal, August 3, 1827. Historian Barbara Fields notes that in Baltimore, “vagrant free blacks (that is to say, those refusing to hire their services to white employers) could be bound or sold for annually renewable terms at the direction of a magistrates’ or orphans’ court.” Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 35. Historian Seth Rockman notes, “The liberal promises of the American Revolution stood beyond the reach of these workers, for whom economic failure was far more common than the upward mobility so widely associated with the era of the early republic.” Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 2.
79. “Travelling Scraps,” Freedom’s Journal, August 15, 1828.
80. “The Day We Celebrate,” Christian Recorder, May 5, 1866.
81. “Benjamin Lundy and His Times,” Baltimore Sun, January 27, 1872.
82. “Twenty-Ninth Congress,” Baltimore Sun, March 19, 1846; “Stampede Among the Slaves—The Underground Railroad,” Baltimore Sun, October 27, 1849; “Opposition to the Underground Railroad,” Baltimore Sun, October 29, 1849.
83. “Methodism and Slavery,” Freedom’s Journal, November 23, 1827.
84. Martha S. Jones, “The Case of Jean Baptiste, un Creole de Saint-Domingue: Narrating Slavery, Freedom, and the Haitian Revolution in Baltimore City,” Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series, vol. 376 (2013).
85. Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 290–92.
86. “Haytien Independence,” Genius of Universal Emancipation and Baltimore Courier, September 12, 1825.
87. Alexander Allen, “U.S. Owes Haitians Gratitude, Not Abuse,” Crisis 89, no. 8 (October 1982): 47. African Americans interpreted events in the Global South through selective lenses and their ideas of freedom struggles throughout the Americas were influenced by the chronic social crises they faced in the United States. As Frank Guridy notes, “The forging of diasporic linkages necessarily entails, as literary scholar Brent Edwards has shown, the messy process of translation and, inevitably, misunderstandings. Projections, mistranslations, and disagreements over meaning are embedded in all forms of Afro-diasporic interaction.” Frank Andrew Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 6–7. It may also be useful to extend Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined community” to the African American project of creating imagined communities of struggle that transcended national borders. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
88. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “Bury Me in a Free Land,” Academy of American Poets, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/bury-me-free-land (accessed October 28, 2015).
89. “The Revolt in Texas,” Freedom’s Journal, April 20, 1827.
90. “From John Adams to John Taylor, 18 January 1815,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6397 (accessed May 9, 2017).
91. “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” Freedom’s Journal, May 4, 1827.
92. “Gomez and Blanco,” Afro-American, June 18, 1898.
93. Historian Laurent Dubois echoes this assessment when he writes, “Haiti, not the US or France, was where the assertion of true universal values reached its defining climax during the Age of Revolution.” Dubois, “Atlantic Freedoms,” Aeon, November 7, 2016, https://aeon.co/essays/why-haiti-should-be-at-the-centre-of-the-age-of-revolution.
94. “Frederick Douglass 1893 Speech in Chicago,” Professor Bob Corbett’s Home Page, Webster University, http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/haiti/history/1844-1915/douglass.htm (accessed January 6, 2016).
95. “The Superstition of Fanaticism,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, April 15, 1865. The Standard reprinted this item, which had originally been published in Benjamin Wood’s New York Daily News the same month.
96. C. L. R. James, A History of Negro Revolt (New York: Haskell House, 1938), 29. This insight was recently reaffirmed by Sven Beckert: “When we think of capitalism, we think of wage workers, yet this prior phase of capitalism was based not on free labor but on slavery. We associate industrial capitalism with contracts and markets, but early capitalism was based as often as not on violence and bodily coercion.” Beckert, Empire of Cotton, xvi.
97. See Staughton Lynd’s essay, “Beard, Jefferson, and the Tree of Liberty,” in Lynd, Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution, 247–69. See also Robin Blackburn’s chapter, “The Planters Back Colonial Revolt,” in Blackburn, The American Crucible, 131–44.
98. “William Whipper’s Letters, no. II,” Colored American, February 20, 1841.
99. “Editorial Correspondence,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 17, 1847. The idea that the anti-slavery cause intersected with anti-imperialism may be found in “Verge of a War with the Mexican Republic,” National Enquirer, November 19, 1836. In 1854, the Western Anti-Slavery Society in Salem, Ohio, critiqued US-based efforts to seize Cuba in order to extend American slavery. See “Resolutions,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, September 15, 1854. See also “National Rapacity,” Pennsylvania Freeman, February 19, 1846. Historians have stressed the connections between slavery and imperialism. See James, Black Jacobins; Cox, Caste, Class, and Race; Johnson, River of Dark Dreams.
CHAPTER 2: THE MEXICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE AND US HISTORY
1. Sentimientos de la Nación de José María Morelos: Antología Documental (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones de México, 1913), 116–24. For broader treatments of the Mexican War of Independence, see Theodore G. Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s First Black Indian President (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001); Virginia Guedea, “The Process of Mexican Independence,” American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (February 2000): 116–30; Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, “The Mexican Declaration of Independence” Journal of American History 85, no. 4 (March 1999): 1362–69; Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 53–115; Christon I. Archer, ed., The Birth of Modern Mexico, 1780–1824 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). On the critical role of muleteers in New Spain, see José Adrián Barragán-Alvarez, “The Feet of Commerce: Mule-Trains and Transportation in Eighteenth-Century New Spain,” PhD diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2013.
2. On Morelos and his role in the Mexican War of Independence, see Rubén Hermensdorf, Morelos: Hombre Fundamental de México (Mexico: Aeromexico-Grijalbo, 1985); H. G. Ward, Mexico in 1827 (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 185–226; John Charles Chasteen, Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 89–121; Wilbert H. Timmons, Morelos: Priest, Soldier, Statesman of Mexico (El Paso: Texas Western College Press, 1963); Peter F. Guardino, “The War of Independence in Guerrero, New Spain, 1808–1821,” in The Wars of Independence in Spanish America, ed. Christon I. Archer (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000), 93–140. Drawing on the racial categories imposed by imperial New Spain in the colonial era, I define “mestizo” as any combination or admixture of European, Indigenous, and African blood. Scholars have established that race is a social construction—one with real consequences. In imperial New Spain, the sistema de castas, the casta system of racial categorization, defined one’s access to wealth, profession, and even rates of taxation, and this was facilitated by the information priests wrote on infant baptismal records as well as census records. For the casta system and racial formation in colonial Latin America, see Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race; Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Herman L. Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
